Interviews are an important part of the hiring process, and it allows employers to get to know their candidates on a more personal level. I have been on both sides of the table during the interview process and have learned what can make an interview effective and ineffective.
Being in a supervisor position, I performed interviews for two different departments in a health clinic. The organization itself had a structured set of questions but these questions were geared toward primary care offices, and we were interviewing for specialty clinics. My manager and I agreed to create our own structured set of questions to ask that pertained more toward our clinic.
From my experience on both sides of the table, I believe that having a combination of an unstructured and a structured interview is the most effective. Having an unstructured interview at the beginning “breaks the ice” and allows the interviewee to see our personalities as well as us seeing theirs. After the interviewee is more relaxed, they have an easier time answering the structured interview questions that we had for them.
I was involved in one fully unstructured interview, where a provider and manager went “off book” and at the end of the interview, I felt that I, as the supervisor, did’t gain any useful knowledge on the interviewee because the provider asked a lot of close ended questions. Unstructured interviews have limitations and can produce a large amount of data that can make analyzing the information difficult when making recommendations to move forward.
Structured interviews are designed to measure job-related competencies of a candidate by inquiring about their behaviors in past experiences. On the interviewee side, I believe structured interviews are easier to prepare for because most companies have similar questions. As a candidate, it allows me to think of situations ahead of time and practice how I would answer some of the questions that I believe will be asked. On the supervisor side, structured interviews provide more useful information about a candidate’s competencies and how they handled specific situations in the past.
